I am living in an on-campus apartment. These apartments have one ethernet port that we can connect a device to and we are not allowed to connect a router to it, we are to use campus wifi. If we are discovered as having a router, they will block the connection. My problem is that there is only one ethernet port in the whole apartment, and I have multiple devices I would like to connect to ethernet. I'm not trying to get wifi, so could I just connect the ethernet port to a switch (such as the TP-Link Gigabit switch)? I'm not very familiar with networks so if this would work, would it be slower (perhaps due to all devices receiving the same broadcast or something)?
102 Answers
This is something you really need to discuss with the IT team as the answer depends entirely on their goals and network policies - and we can't answer that here.
If they are trying to limit use of the network, installing your own switch would be very visible, as the MAC address of each device you plug in will be apparent. This could cause issues for the IT department if, for exame, there is a shortage of MAC addresses.
They may be OK with you plugging in multie devices and have the limitation because they are are trying to maximise availability of WIFI, which is best done when they control all the channels. (By controlling WIFI they eliminate a tragedy-of-the-commons issue) If that is there goal they may not have a problem with you adding a switch - although you might ask for an exception to have your own router without WIFI in this case.
The accepted answer is more-or-less correct except the last paragraph about sharing a PC - what he is describing is just "rolling your own" router, and from a technical POV IS a router - most routers are small computers running a variant of Linux to do exactly this.
Connecting a switch will be detected even more easily than a router so I would say that if you're not allowed to use a router then for sure you should not use a switch.
A router can be configured to share one connection to more devices. A router can then "pretend" it is a single PC and share that connection with other devices.
A switch is much more "dumb" and cannot do that. If you connect multiple devices through a switch each device will ask for an IP address through that single connection. That can easily be detected (more easy than a router) at the other end of your ethernet connection.
Your way out might be to connect a PC to the ethernet port and share the internet connection of that PC. Then the PC is the router so if that still fits the rules is up to you. If the PC is a desktop without WiFi then buy a cheap WiFi USB stick to make it WiFi capable.
2
